A Universal Intensity Standardization Method Based on a Many-to-One Weak-Paired Cycle Generative Adversarial Network for Magnetic Resonance Images

In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), different imaging settings lead to various intensity distributions for a specific imaging object, which brings huge diversity to data-driven medical applications. To standardize the intensity distribution of magnetic resonance (MR) images from multiple centers and multiple machines using one model, a cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN)-based framework is proposed. It utilizes a unified forward generative adversarial network (GAN) path and multiple independent backward GAN paths to transform images in different groups into a single reference one. To preserve image details and prevent resolution loss, two jump connections are applied in the CycleGAN generators. A weak-pair strategy is designed to fully utilize the prior knowledge of the organ structure and promote the performance of the GANs. The experiments were conducted on a T2-FLAIR image database with 8192 slices from 489 patients. The database was obtained from four hospitals and five MRI scanners and was divided into nine groups with different imaging parameters. Compared with the representative algorithms, the peak signal-to-noise ratio, the histogram correlation, and the structural similarity were increased by 3.7%, 5.1%, and 0.1% on average, respectively; the gradient magnitude similarity deviation, the mean square error, and the average disparity were reduced by 19.0%, 15.7%, and 9.9% on average, respectively. Experiments also showed the robustness of the proposed model with a different training set configuration and effectiveness of the proposed framework over the original CycleGAN. Therefore, the MR images with different imaging settings could be efficiently standardized by the proposed method, which would benefit various data-driven applications.